"A plain, three hundred miles in length, by a hundred and twenty in breadth, and in the greatest portion of its length exhibiting an alluvial soil watered by the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, the Tagliamento, and the Piave, falling from the Alps, with the Taro and other streams falling from the Apennines, and the whole plain traversed through its centre by the Po, affording the amplest means of irrigation, the only requisite in this favoured region for the production of the richest pastures and the most luxuriant harvests." "On the west," says this master of picturesque description, "it is sheltered by a vast semicircle of mountains, which there unite the Alps and the Apennines, and are surmounted by glittering piles of ice and snow, forming the majestic barrier between France and Italy. In those inexhaustible reservoirs, which the heat of summer converts into perennial fountains of living water, the Po takes its rise; and that classic stream, rapidly fed by the confluence of the torrents which descend through every cleft and valley in the vast circumference, is already a great river when it sweeps under the ramparts of Turin." The description of its agriculture is equally glowing with that of its mountain boundaries. "A system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has been long established over its whole surface, and two, sometimes three, successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. An incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps into a series of little canals, like the veins and arteries in the human body, to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! Within the last twenty years the export from the Lombardo-Venetian States has trebled." All those details give an impression of the security of property, which is the first effect of a paternal government. They fully answer all the absurd charges of impoverishment by Austria, of barbarism in its laws, or of severity in its institutions. Lombardy, independent, will soon have reason to lament the change from Austrian protection.